A Quote by Howard Bloom

From our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart. From our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals comes our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor, murder, torture, genocide and war.
Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.
The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.
It is most often not our strengths, our courage or our successes that bring two human hearts together, but it is often our shared vulnerability, our fears and our common failures that make us one.
I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.
Since the purpose of reading, of education, is to become good, our most important task is to choose the right books. Our personal set of stories, our canon, shapes our lives. I believe it is a law of the universe that we will not rise above our canon. Our canon is part of us, deeply, subconsciously. And the characters and teachings in our canon shape our characters--good, evil, mediocre, or great.
Holy Angels, our advocates, our brothers, our counselors, our defenders, our enlighteners, our friends, our guides, our helpers, our intercessors - Pray for us.
We often read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our triumph, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness.
Before making peace, war is necessary, and that war must be made with our self. Our worst enemy is our self: our faults, our weaknesses, our limitations. And our mind is such a traitor! What does it? It covers our faults even from our own eyes, and points out to us the reason for all our difficulties: others! So it constantly deludes us, keeping us unaware of the real enemy, and pushes us towards those others to fight them, showing them to us as our enemies.
The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure.
As Shantideva says, suffering has many good qualities because it purifies our negative karma, increases our renunciation and compassion, reduces our pride, and helps us to overcome our bad mental habits. If we think in this way we will feel that difficult circumstances are our best friends. When our mind is balanced in this way it becomes as stable as Mount Meru, and nothing can cause it to shake.
Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.
Our good nature and endearing qualities will not arouse the answers to our prayers. Rather it is our mischievous, dishonest attributes that provide the master keys to heaven. When we identify and work to transform our self-centered qualities and crooked characteristics, the key turns and the gates unlock. Blessings and good fortune are now free to rain down upon us.
As a first generation American myself, I know that comprehensive immigration reform is good for our country. I know it will reduce our deficit, grow our economy, reaffirm our values, advance our ideals, and honor our history as a nation of immigrants.
Our words reveal our thoughts; our manners mirror our self-esteem; our actions reflect our character; our habits predict the future.
If we are at war with our parents, our family, our society, or our church, there is probably a war going on inside us also, so the most basic work for peace is to return to ourselves and create harmony among the elements within us - our feelings, our perceptions, and our mental states. That is why the practice of meditation, looking deeply, is so important.
Most people would say they live with an internal angst that they can't always put their finger on. This is because the Internet has changed our very way of being in this world, compelling us to be perpetually "on" - from our cars to our computers, our tablets to our smartphones, our desks to our living rooms or dining tables, our churches to our libraries to our schools.
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